@elduvelle @NicoleCRust @vineettiruvadi

Here's a great quote for you to ponder when you have time, from Alicia Juarrero's new book #ContextChangesEverything:

"according to #reductionism, our intuition that mental processes such as intentions and beliefs have powers to actively bring about meaningful, purposive actions is illusory. Thoughts, feelings, and intentions derive their powers and properties from biology; biology from those of chemistry; chemistry from physics. Properties that appear unique to biological organisms (such as being alive) or human beings (such as symbolic language) can, in principle, be inferred from chemical processes that constitute them. #Causal powers that seem to issue from those higher-level properties can be derived from physical properties, at least in principle. It is not quite “turtles all the way down,” however. The turtle at the bottom (at the level of elementary physics) is special. The primary properties of a-toms, reality’s constituents (read now quarks and electrons), are the real and most simple stuff that does the causal work and provides #explanatory power. Ultimate causes reside in and issue from there. Meaning and purpose are impotent.

Such is the dream of a #theoryofeverything , the promise of an equation that spells out the lawful correlations among microdetails and from which everything else can be derived and precisely predicted."

p.173:

"The parameterization of data collection (what we might call its thickness or depth) may expand, but parameters must pass through disciplinary optics and become operationalized before they are articulated in
any way."

Or, data don't "speak for themselves", but only gain their meaning when incorporated into disciplinary practices.

The definition I learned as undergrad: "Data are numbers in context." #ContextChangesEverything

#scale #DigitalLife